Color restoration from digital camera data by pattern matching

Digital cameras are gaining popularity in many applications of multimedia information processing. But the CCD sensor used by digital cameras does not provide all three red, green, blue primaries for each pixel. Instead it uses an interlaced sampling scheme with only one primary per pixel. This article considers the problem of reconstructing a 24-bit/pixel color image from the interlaced sampling. A simple, efficient, and effective algorithm for color restoration from digital camera data is proposed. The proposed algorithm uses a pattern matching technique to reconstruct the missing color primaries based on the pixel contexts. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the technique of color interpolation.